Rock Around the Clock

By RICHARD CORLISS/WASHINGTON

Jack Nicholson read the words of Abraham Lincoln. Aretha Franklin, a natural woman in a natural fur, sang a hymn to single motherhood from Les Miserables. Kermit the Frog sent Gonzo the Great searching for the White House. Barbra Streisand performed a knockout set and gave her benediction to the party's Arkansas hosts. Warren Beatty, recently married, spoke of political honeymoons. En Vogue and Boys II Men showed that a cappella renditions of The Star-Spangled Banner could have art and soul. Michael Jackson led a chorus of glamourati in We Are the World. Some geezer band from the '70s reunited to sing Don't Stop (Thinkin' About Tomorrow).

Who could stop singing Don't Stop? (David Letterman's advice to Fleetwood Mac: "Stop!") That catchy jingle was the only tune on America's mental jukebox last week, when movie and music stars descended on Washington in numbers not seen since the bond drives of World War II. The whole wide world of American tinsel and twang -- Oprah Winfrey, Little Richard, Kenny Rogers, Bill Cosby, Kathleen Battle, Macaulay Culkin, Harry Belafonte -- showed up, swelling the Rat Pack of John F. Kennedy's day to Hamelin proportions, offering its best wishes to a new Administration. Chuck Berry updated the lyrics to his '50s chugger Reelin' and Rockin': "I set my watch and it was quarter to eight,/ You know, Bill's gonna get this country straight." Rapper ( L.L. Cool J had the word from a new generation: " '93! You and me! U-ni-tee!/ Time to par-tee with Big Bill and Hillaree."

At this multimillion-dollar partee, Big Bill Clinton -- excuse us, William Jefferson Clinton -- played the role of First Audience. TV viewers of America's Reunion on the Mall on Sunday, or of Tuesday afternoon's Salutes to Children and Youth and the evening's Presidential Gala, could doze through all the dos. Clinton couldn't and wouldn't. A pretty fair performer himself, he knew that a speaker is only as good as his listeners. So he gave the victory fist to soprano (and fellow Arkansan) Barbara Hendricks. He misted up at Goldie Hawn's tale of her dead father. Jackson's song for AIDS victim Ryan White induced a dry cry in Clinton. "Mr. About-to-Be-President," as music mogul Quincy Jones addressed him, gave the thumbs-up to Bob Dylan, though the old folkie's mumble through Chimes of Freedom earned a look of wry amazement from First Daughter Chelsea.

Celebrity has its muscle in America, but politics has the power. Eddie Murphy can't drop a bomb, he can only make one. Steven Spielberg can beam E.T. home, but he can't run NASA. Superagent Mike Ovitz can't appoint a Supreme Court Justice (at least, we don't think he can). So the artists, most of them liberal Democrats, came to celebrate the politics of inclusion: after 12 years, or maybe 30, they were back on a party line to Washington clout.

The stars came out in constellations because they recognized in Clinton one of their own. Not just that he plays the saxophone, a little. Or that Hillary is a smart, tough lawyer, like most Hollywood moguls. Or that Tipper Gore is a photojournalist with a motherly interest in pop music. Or that Chelsea was working her video recorder at the Inaugural. What matters is that Clinton is a prime communicator, a beacon of middle-class charisma, a lover of being loved, a believer in the importance -- perhaps the primacy -- of image, metaphor, style. And an ace manipulator of media, selling his symbols directly to the people, on TV, without the interference of pesky journalists. It all makes for a wondrous '90s blend of show biz and politics, of Hollywood and Heartland.

"This is our time," Clinton said in his Inaugural Address. "Let us embrace it." Last week he had an embrace for everyone, and not just the stars. This huggy-bear President needs to feel the electromagnetism of approval -- but in a New Age way. His seeming candor is an amalgam of born- * again witnessing and self-help testifying, of the church and the couch; you half expect his budget package to be a 12-step program. "I used to play my saxophone a lot, sometimes when I was angry but usually when I was lonely," Clinton told Mister Rogers during the Salute to Children. "I could play for hours and hours and hours, and I wouldn't be lonely anymore." While turning confession into anecdote, he displays a genial sincerity. It is said that the two hardest phrases for an actor to make convincing are "I believe in God" and "I love you." Clinton can do both and make them sound true. Maybe they are. That's part of the unfolding drama: to see if this Era of Good Touchy- Feely is for real.

Computer wizards play the game of virtual reality. Clinton, like Ronald Reagan before him, mastered a more dangerous skill -- virtual fantasy -- and the nation played along. During the long presidential campaign, TV screens showed Clinton gradually transformed, morphed, from a wannabe to a has-been to a third-place candidate to a front runner. And from a politician to a youthful superstar. He was fresh, and everyone else was tired.

That was never truer than at the swearing-in ceremony on Inauguration Day. The new President radiated the confidence of a young star athlete who couldn't wait for the coach to send him into the big game. Twice while taking the oath of office, he nearly stepped on Chief Justice William Rehnquist's lines. Meanwhile, George Bush, who was married before Clinton was born, wore an understandably defeated look. He stared at Clinton with the naked anguish of a father whose teenage boy had just beaten him at arm wrestling for the first time.

You didn't have to be from the G.O.P. to feel like a wallflower at this '90s party; you only had to be from the '80s. At the swearing-in ceremony, Geraldine Ferraro was looking lost and alone in her mediocre seat. At one of the fancy private dinners, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis were planted in a dark corner and remained unintroduced throughout the evening.

When 100,000 visitors come to town and everybody expects to be treated like Somebody, even A-listers can get snafued. Late one night Whoopi Goldberg and Lauren Bacall couldn't find their limo and had to ride back to their hotel in a school bus. Other beautiful people got to exercise their cynicism. One dissed the Tennessee Ball: "It was like every bad wedding you've ever been to rolled into one." Hillary's dowdy hat and Republican-style cloth coat were subjected to many a jape: "She'll be the first Casual Corner First Lady." How very catty the talk was, and how very '50s. Listen up: the woman is just too hip to bother trying to be chic.

Most folks, though, seemed happy just to be there. Hollywood took its manners from Washington: most of the celebrities dressed conservatively and behaved decorously. And the civilians lined up for the big parade, where the Lesbian & Gay Bands of America played and Girl Scouts passed out American flags and AIDS ribbons. A Clinton spotting could cue an impromptu chant: "Chel-sea! Chel-sea!" at the hot-ticket MTV Ball. Though the rockers booed Tipper Gore for her lyric-sanitation campaign, they gave a hand to Clinton's rowdy half-brother Roger. And so did the music industry. Atlantic Records snagged him to preserve forever his rendition of Sam Cooke's A Change Is Gonna Come. Let's sing along: "Then I go to my brother,/ And I say, brother, help me please." Well, Bill did help Roger get famous. Fifteen minutes and counting, bro.

Bill Clinton has also been known to party hearty, but in his soul he may be a wonk. He is no more afraid to be square in his musical taste (his favorite sax player -- Kenny G?) than Maya Angelou was to be passionate, politically correct and perfectly understood in her Inaugural Day poem. At 13 balls that night, Clinton was like the college grind who drops in on frat bashes the night before the exam to show he's one of the guys, then sneaks back to his dorm to cram. Perhaps there is as much Nixon in him (the ambition, the intellect, the unkillability) as Kennedy (the charm, the recklessness, his position as centrist custodian of liberal dreams). He will need to be the best of both men if he is to close, as he said last week, "the gap between our words and our deeds."

At Woodstock on the Mall, actor Edward James Olmos quoted Lincoln: "We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country." Clinton, a good student with a good memory, mouthed the words as Olmos spoke them. Clinton must have realized that, in a different sense and a different era, America faces the task of disenthralling itself, of shaking off the Hollywood stardust and facing facts.

In '92 Clinton vended optimism; now he must become a pitchman for austerity. He sold the nation a miracle product, All-New Hope: it gives you cleaner, cheaper government with a fresh minty flavor. But if it doesn't get the stains out, the electorate's high hopes could sour into despair. Then the man called ( Hope will become the man called Hype -- nothing more than a baby-boomer Babbitt. All the big stars and better angels will leave him out in the spotlight, stranded, unmasked.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/ Washington